I apologize for leaving your posts up as long as I did. I haven’t looked at my blog for a couple of months, and even at Thanksgiving I was posting from my cell phone, which made it difficult at that moment to look at and moderate the comments (not to mention my need to keep an eye on my boys). I hope that I have not inadvertently caused you any harm. If it is ok with you, I will leave your posts up but with initials only, as you requested.

]]>By: Bill Peltzhttps://blog.timesunion.com/rebdeb/operation-homecoming/250/#comment-322
Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:32:24 +0000http://blogs.timesunion.com/rebdeb/?p=250#comment-322Today, for the first time, I decided to take a look at the TU’s blog list and saw yours and Sam Trumbore’s. I hope you will write more.

Weeping for returning soldiers is a good thing. We need more weeping and less anger.

I was fortunate enough to miss the Army and then the Korean War because my knee got smashed up by high school football. Perhaps I missed an important formative experience, but the circumstances of war, particularly in the current occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, are too shattering to the participants for me to have any regrets.

(re: occupations: I think we would understand things better if we didn’t use the wrong word “war” for the current actions in Iraq and Afghanistan — we ‘won’ those wars militarily, didn’t we, and then installed supposedly sovereign governments, so now we’re clearly, and in legalistic terms, “occupiers”.)

As a mostly-pacifist (interposing oneself between a knife-wielder and a prospective victim makes sense to me, even as a model for larger scale interventions that might hypothetically be justifiable even if in fact they’re executed in the wrong way and for questionable reasons), I still have empathy with war-shattered people, even those who have done some of the most brutal things.

I mourn for the killed on all sides and for the killers. All have lost. It is to weep, indeed.